Barack Obama promised Obamacare would cut every family's premiums by $2,500 a year.
Sixteen years later, a federal watchdog decided to find out if that was true.
What they uncovered is the one thing Chuck Schumer hopes you never see.
Schumer's Pentagon Stunt Lands in a Fraud Firestorm
Chuck Schumer grabbed headlines last week by attacking War Secretary Pete Hegseth over the Pentagon's end-of-fiscal-year spending – king crab, Herman Miller recliners, ice cream machines, fruit baskets, and a Steinway grand piano.
Hegseth spent $93.4 billion in September – the same amount, Schumer claimed, that could fund three years of enhanced Obamacare tax credits.
The White House was not impressed.
"If Chuck Schumer really cared about healthcare affordability, he would drop the vapid PR stunts and spend his time working with the Administration and Republicans to pass President Trump's Great Healthcare Plan to lower premiums and slash drug prices," White House spokesman Kush Desai said.
Schumer left out several details.
The steak and crab legs were for troops deployed in war zones and sailors whose deployments had just been extended — a Pentagon tradition documented going back to Afghanistan under Obama's own Defense Secretary Robert Gates.
When CNN's Paul Begala repeated the attack on air, Scott Jennings stopped him cold: "It's for the troops — troops who are going to war."
Begala had no idea.
Neither did Schumer, apparently — or he knew and attacked the troops anyway.
And the Pentagon's September spending nearly matched the $79 billion Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin burned through in September 2024, under Biden — and Schumer said nothing then.
End-of-year spending spikes every year, under every administration.
GAO's Obamacare Fraud Test Found Something Schumer Can't Explain
While Schumer was performing on X, the Government Accountability Office was finishing an undercover investigation that confirmed every warning conservatives have raised about Obamacare for fifteen years.
GAO agents created 20 fake identities with fraudulent Social Security numbers, falsified income claims, and counterfeit citizenship documents.
The federal marketplace approved 19 of 20 for subsidized coverage.
As of September 2025, 18 of those fake people were still enrolled – with taxpayers sending more than $10,000 per month to insurers on their behalf.
That is not a glitch.
GAO ran nearly identical tests in 2014, 2015, and 2016 and got the same results every time.
The warnings went nowhere.
Brian Blase, president of the Paragon Health Institute, put the scale in plain terms: an estimated 6.4 million people are improperly enrolled in fully subsidized plans, and roughly 3 to 4 million are likely "phantom enrollees" – either fictitious identities or real people who have no idea they have coverage.
In 2024, 35 percent of ACA enrollees never used their coverage – more than double the rate in a normal health insurance market.
"In a normal health insurance market, there's about 15% of people that don't use their health insurance in a given year," Blase told Fox News Digital.
Hitting 35 percent, he said, is suspicious.
The Obamacare Fraud Convictions Democrats Ignored
The DOJ has spent years securing criminal convictions that prove the scale of the problem.
In November 2025, the president of a brokerage firm and a marketing executive were convicted by a jury in a $233 million scheme – collecting federal subsidies by enrolling people in Obamacare plans without their knowledge.
Both received 20-year prison sentences in February 2026.
A separate Florida brokerage executive pled guilty in April 2025 to falsifying income claims to pocket subsidies for ineligible enrollees – targeting low-income individuals experiencing homelessness and mental health crises – at a cost to taxpayers of at least $133.9 million.
One Social Security number was used across 125 different insurance policies in a single year.
GAO identified 66,000 Social Security numbers used multiple times in 2024 to collect more than a year's worth of coverage.
In just eight months of 2024, CMS received 275,000 complaints from Americans who had been enrolled in or switched into plans without their consent.
The Promise Obama Made and the Program He Left Behind
Obama promised premiums would drop $2,500 per family per year.
Premiums rose more than 60 percent in the first four years.
PolitiFact named his "if you like your plan, you can keep it" pledge the Lie of the Year for 2013.
Obama eventually acknowledged the promise "ended up not being accurate."
The Biden administration then opened Obamacare enrollment to DACA recipients in direct defiance of the statute Obama himself signed, which limited subsidies to those "lawfully present."
A federal judge blocked the rule in states that sued.
The national debt is closing in on $39 trillion, and Chuck Schumer wants to extend a program where fake people created by federal investigators are still collecting subsidies, convicted felons built nine-figure fraud operations inside it, and the government's own auditors can't account for $21 billion in payments – all because Pete Hegseth fed the troops.
Conservatives have been sounding the alarm since Obamacare passed.
Blase's research shows millions of improperly enrolled people are in the program right now.
GAO has been running the same undercover tests since 2014 and getting the same result every time.
"We need to reform the ACA, not throw more taxpayer money at it," Blase said.
Obama made the promises. Democrats defended the program. The fraud was there the whole time.
Sources:
- Ashley Oliver, "Fraud scrutiny clouds Schumer's Obamacare credit push after his Pentagon 'luxury' spending jab," Fox News, March 17, 2026.
- Brian Blase, "The Falsehoods of Obamacare: A Dozen Broken Promises, Seven Million Canceled Plans, and Hundreds of Billions in Debt," Paragon Health Institute, January 12, 2026.
- Brian Blase, "GAO Probe Finds ACA at High Risk for Fraud: 96% of Fake Applications Approved," Paragon Health Institute, December 3, 2025.
- U.S. Government Accountability Office, "Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act: Preliminary Results from Ongoing Review Suggest Fraud Risks in the Advance Premium Tax Credit Persist," GAO-26-108742, December 3, 2025.
- Senator Ashley Moody, "Senator Moody Calls on DOJ to Recoup Fraudulent Obamacare Subsidy Payments," February 13, 2026.
- U.S. Senate Finance Committee, "New Report: Billions of Dollars Wasted, Consumers Harmed Due to Health Care Fraud in Obamacare Plans," December 4, 2025.
- Streiff, "Hegseth Hatred Leaves Democrat Politicians and Media With Egg on Their Faces As Well As Steak and Lobster," RedState, March 12, 2026.